May Memory Restore
by nimmieamee
Summary: Howard & Peggy & SHIELD, throughout the years.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: Special thanks to Dayadhvam for her help with the first part of this. Title is from Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day, by Delmore Schwartz.

* * *

Howard was never supposed to meet new recruits. Not Howard. Howard lived in a permanent spring; everything had to be new. The engines, the fashions, the wiring, the drinks. But not the staff. There Howard's life took on a peculiar quirk. Philips, Dugan, Morita, Jones. Names with history. Names with relevance to Howard, who could not be expected to remember any names that were irrelevant.

But still. Certain names – people – meant a lot to Howard. Howard, forward-looking futurist. Howard, engineer of the new century. Howard, who'd sunk and was still sinking no small sum of money into the deep blue waters up North. Howard, who believed in science and the serum and who never, ever spoke of the welcome home party he'd planned in his hazy, hopeful, forward-looking dreams. Howard, fast becoming a hard man and a realist, who hadn't really planned or thought through the highly patriotic and decorated funeral he always said he'd arrange when they found the body.

He still publicly held out hope they might find the body. It was 1960 and there was no reason to think or say this. But that was Howard for you.

Certain people meant a lot to Howard. For example, Peggy. The first thing he'd done when they'd brought Peggy back was apologize. Not the first thing he'd said. The first thing he'd said to her was: "Well, we thought you would prove yourself and that would be the end of it. We didn't think it would take months."

He'd surprised her at the worst moment. Come up behind her table, never having let on that he'd be early – Howard! Early! – to their first ever meeting as SHIELD operatives. Heads. Howard was long past the point where he'd settle for being a mere operative. Peggy was getting there herself.

She'd been checking her hair in her compact. She would not have pulled out a compact if she'd known Howard would be right there behind her. Howard was Howard, but Howard even in 1945 was often trailed by a formless cloud of colonels and senators, exactly the kind of people who could demote her for being feminine enough to own a compact, let alone consult one wherever they might be reminded of her femininity. But the compact only showed Howard. No formless cloud. Just Howard and a Howard non-apology.

So she hadn't said anything. She'd given Howard a minute to sweat. Howard did not take the minute; he was not a sweating man. He only said, "Did Agent Flynn tell you what an honor it was?"

And that was how she'd learned that Howard had already worked out an apology. When he'd finally dialed New York. That was the most you could expect of Howard. He often knew more than he'd let on about, and he would never lower himself to simple humility, but his actions could be as bold and committed and calculating and kind as a very clever child's.

And after the apology and non-apology, somehow fifteen years passed. They each married. Other people. It was common knowledge that Howard would have slept with her. But after that he never could have worked with her. And even Howard understood that, so outside the SHIELD gossip mill, beyond people who were not Howard and Peggy, the topic never once came up.

Even though the working relationship was touch and go in other ways. Howard could never have devoted himself to SHIELD. He could barely devote himself to his wife, and he was bound to her before the eyes of god. No, Howard was in and out. He had a company, he had patents, he had deep sea research and he had space exploration, the collection and cataloguing of ancient relics, scholarships to found and charity dinners to sponsor. It was not that he flitted from task to task; that was not Howard; when Howard had his attention anywhere, it was his full attention. The trick was getting that attention in the first place. There was so much else to occupy Howard. Too much.

Which was why no one expected him to drop in so suddenly. HQ was busy, simultaneously empty of agents, everyone needed in the field, and yet full to bursting with technicians, tactical support, rescue on standby, military attaches, political persons, young and anxious men with coffee. It was 1960. Sharpeville was fading from the papers, workers in South America were gathering, the president was denying any knowledge whatsoever of a certain plane in Soviet airspace. SHIELD was not instrumental in any of these things, not yet. Peggy wasn't sure they'd ever be quite what Howard's political cloud wanted them to be: a cure-all, a constant onslaught, eternal sentinels on the ground. But they were involved. And very very busy.

Days like these were the very reason she was considering the new hire. She had too many people on staff who she would have very cheerfully shot on a bad day, and yet no one to spare. No one was present to collect Howard, no familiar face, no old wartime presence to reassure Howard that SHIELD was SHIELD and all was well.

Howard was very unused to this lack of fanfare.

But if he was confused, he didn't show it. There was no one paying enough attention for him to complain to. So he didn't. He helped himself into Peggy's office. He left her papers alone, did not sit in her chair, respectfully saluted to the photo of the skinny young man in his gilt frame near the window. Then Howard took the best seat before the desk, threw his coat over her best paperweight, and unwound his scarf, tossing it behind him, where an uncomfortable upholstered couch lingered in the shadow of the open closet door.

Howard contemplated getting a drink. The logistics of it. Peggy did not keep a bar on hand; she thought it encouraged her least favorite types – senators and others in the formless cloud – to linger in her office and take liberties with her paperweights. This Howard knew. So obtaining a decent drink from the vicinity of Peggy's office would take peculiar genius.

Which, mind you, he had.

There was a cough behind him. The cough was perfect. It had in it very little censure and some undercurrent of humility, as though it didn't mean to intrude. Above all: it was direct. Howard had been coughed at a great deal in his life. He knew that coughs were not meant to be direct. If they were, people would not turn them on Howard Stark, who outranked lots of people and therefore had to be tackled indirectly. But this cough was marvelously direct.

Howard turned around. The closet door was a large brown wood slab. It was open. Peggy's beautiful woman's jackets and unisex agent coats were on full display, along with some hats. Nice hats. But the wide sweep of the door was blocking part of the couch. He could not see anything but a long and respectable kind of leg, with professional shoes and dark socks and a strip of white ankle. This was the source of the cough, anatomically bizarre as this was to contemplate. The leg had coughed at him. Directly. Simply. As though to let him know it was there. It seemed to believe – rightly – that it would have been unforgivably rude to let him think he was alone in the office.

Howard reached out an arm and struck the closet door. It swung closed. The leg on the couch turned out to be attached to a young man. Tallish. Blond. His eyebrows were friendly. He had a full but wholesome mouth. He'd folded Howard's scarf.

"My god, you are right there," Howard said.

There were perhaps two feet between them. Generous estimate.

"It's not a very big office," said the young man, with no reproach and no self-righteousness. Simply as a fact. And he was entirely correct. Peggy's office was small. The other offices were even smaller. They had not moved HQ in fifteen years; this was the same old cramped building that they'd been granted to begin with. Howard resolved to remedy that.

"She deserves something with a view," Howard said. "With big windows. Overlooking something nice, like some greenery. Or maybe a river."

"The Potomac," said the young man.

"What?" said Howard, who had moved on to planning buildings in his head.

"Local river. The Potomac."

"I know that," Howard said. "I know what the Potomac is. I'm not an imbecile; in fact, I'm a genius." Then, an added: "It'll do." He turned back around. They lapsed back into silence. It lasted for some time. Howard constructed and discarded several hidden sublevels, contemplated the invention and relative usefulness of shatterproof windows, devised the best place to position offices relative to the hangar complex.

"Can I ask you something?" said the young man.

It was a fairly modest request. Howard waved his assent.

"Could you make a man more like a machine?" the young man asked, very seriously.

"That's hokey," Howard said. He took out a cigarette. Lit it. Belatedly remembered Peggy's feelings about smoking in her office and stood to open the nearest window. As he did this, he added, "Could you do it? No. Could I do it? Probably."

He ran through the list of possible candidates for such a project. Unfortunately, one name in particular kept rising to the top.

"I met a scientist on the way up here," the young man said, as though reading his thoughts. "In the elevator."

But Howard was back to dreaming of the someday-HQ. Fully monitored elevators that locked on command. And were encased in glass. And ran fast, almost too fast—

"He said it was the dream regular Americans weren't visionary enough to dream about. Your average person would never want to do it. Even if it could cure their ailments. Make them better. Stronger."

That kind of talk was antiquated. It had been years since Howard had heard it. Only back then the code word had been serums, not machines. But they'd had a machine phase as well; it just hadn't been as well-received. Howard had filed it away with flying cars and glowing cubes found in the nether regions of the ocean. To be returned to and examined at a later date, when he wasn't so busy.

Anyway, it was one thing to promise a person the miraculous enhancements of a super serum, of science. Science, as a term, still had some worth. Howard married science with technology, with machines. They were close cousins if not in fact the same thing, at a certain level. But he'd learned to lie about what he did. Science was comforting still, promising. Technology was comforting and terrifying in equal measure. Bombs. Reactors. Missiles. You couched it in wholesome American terms, you talked about defensive strategies proven by the world's leading minds, you got some quack to tell people all this stuff was okay; they just had to buy the right masks, stockpile canned goods, and duck under their desks in case of emergency.

In small ways, technology was making a comeback. It could get beautifully domesticated, just like their resident Swiss expat whack job who liked to corral hapless people in elevators. Technology was no longer just a wartime bogeyman, a terrifying dehumanizing German onslaught of efficiency. Now it was also deluxe refrigerators. Dishwashers for every _truly_ middle-class American family. Washing machines.

People might be amenable to it now, no matter what Zola blathered on about. Zola had a dour opinion of humanity. But you just had to sell it right.

"Would you do it?" Howard asked. "Man and machine? Machine man? Whatever."

"If I had a reason," said the young man.

"Alright, say it does make you stronger."

"I'm already pretty strong," said the young man, with good humor.

He was. He looked it. Military bearing. Slim, but powerful. A kind of forthright look to him.

"There's gotta be something wrong with you," Howard said. "Or there will be, in time. Human body's like that. So say I mechanize you. And it fixes what's wrong with you. It fixes everything. I've done that before. I could do it again."

"Nobody's born perfect. But it makes you stronger to work past that. Don't know if a machine could provide the same—" the young man grinned, waved a hand, "—personal development."

Howard gave him a hard look. "So why bring it up? If there's no good reason."

The young man shrugged. "I didn't say that. There's no good personal reason to worship technology."

Ah. A Luddite. Howard knew them well. He dealt with them often. He kept a personal bar in every single one of his offices purely to make dealing with them easier. This one was probably from the heartland. Or maybe not. The accent had faint traces of New York.

"What an all-American response, then," Howard said dourly. He turned back around.

"It's worth if if it makes us all stronger," said the young man, as though he hadn't just been dismissed. "If it cures us all. Not just me, I mean. That's what I told him. The scientist. It's got make us all stronger. The whole nation. The world."

Howard turned back to him. The young man was grinning. It lit up his whole face. His teeth were even and white; his pale, long-lashed eyes were impossibly bright. He said, "I think most real all-Americans would say the same, don't you?"

Howard was hit with a sudden wave of familiarity.

He was older now, and getting even older. It had been fifteen years. Life showed no signs of slowing down. Only sometimes it seemed to repeat itself. Conversations and faces cycled past; the same opinions, but repackaged; similar conflicts, but a little darker this time around, mostly because they'd already happened in some sense. Howard kept pushing onwards to the future. But the truth was: the future wasn't all that different from the past. And it took a very arrogant, very hopeful man to resist that idea. Howard was usually that man. But sometimes despair struck, sometimes even SHIELD seemed like an echo of some old nightmare – the people it collected, the politicking, even some of the goals that trickled down from the very same corner that had granted them their existence. Howard kept his trap shut about it. Uncharacteristic, for him. But he valued Peggy and her work. And he had so much to do, besides. Who cared if it sometimes felt like he was the only person who saw the worst bits of the past resurfacing, popping up at the oddest times?

But here was the past and it wasn't the bad stuff. It was golden and bright. It sat on the couch and grinned at him, courageous and direct.

"Let's talk, you and I," Howard told the young man. "What are you: here for a job?"

"She insisted on seeing me twice," said the young man. "Hoping that's a good sign."

They talked. There was a desperate kind of self-assurance to the young man, a sense that he had something to prove, but also a powerful conviction that he would prove it. It was the sort of thing that would have been irresistible, this reckless stubbornness, had Howard been a younger man, and not as hard. It had been intoxicating, back then. Even Howard had ducked his head and accepted a support role, in the face of that.

He hadn't stopped looking yet. He didn't stop looking out for people, not when they meant something to him.

Peggy came in at some point, looking perfectly put together. And, under the perfection, where Howard liked to fancy only he could see through to these days, she also looked extremely harassed.

Howard greeted her, jumped up, collected his things, gave a wave to the young man. The young man handed him his scarf. Howard conducted Peggy into the hallway.

"Right, no, that's my office over there," she said.

"I don't want to move him," Howard explained, suddenly very magnanimous with the new face. "Good kid. Where'd you pick him up?"

"Recommended by Martinsson," said Peggy. "Central intelligence wants him too. He was with strategic air command. A surprisingly able administrator."

"Impressive," Howard said.

"No more so than anyone who works for you these days," Peggy said.

"C'mon, you must have seen it," Howard said. "He's just like him."

It took Peggy a moment to put it together.

She hadn't received that impression at all. She liked the young man well enough, in a distant and professional sense. He was qualified. His background checked out. He was not particularly egomaniacal that she could tell; that was important. His manner was appropriate. And it wasn't like he would be going into the field if she hired him; this was strictly an administrative position. But he was able enough.

He wasn't even a shadow of Steve.

Howard said then that he wanted to check the status of certain propulsion mechanisms he'd designed for use in the field; that was really why he was here. Peggy directed him to the right people. They were young and relatively new and he could rarely locate them on his own. He could never even seem to remember their names.

"Tell me he asked you your name," she told her interviewee, once Howard had gone.

He shrugged good-naturedly and said diplomatically, "He was interesting to talk to. And he humored me. That's enough."

She tried to see it. She couldn't. There were superficial similarities. The coloring. The open, direct way of speaking. But when she snuck a look at the gilt frame, even those comparisons fell apart. Howard respected the gilt frame. But it wasn't quite his Steve there. His Steve was a wonderful creature, always jumping out of planes and proving the value of scientific and technological enhancement. But that had only ever been a very small fraction of the real Steve Rogers.

Even so. She couldn't go through life rejecting people just because they weren't Steve. And there was nothing wrong with the new hire. In fact, he was perfect for the position.

"Welcome on board, Mr. Pierce," she said.

* * *

Later, much later, Peggy would wake up in the middle of the night and fragments of the memory would play over in her head. But she'd lost the ability to understand it. So she re-wrote the story.

"Steve is back," she would tell her nurse. "Steve is back and I've given him the position. Oh, but tell Sharie not to take the position. The organization's changed. The organization's changed."

Her nurse would gently push Peggy, a model patient, down onto the pillows, and smooth her hair, and say, "Shhhhh."


	2. Chapter 2

On the day Howard was to premiere his new blowback design model-7s, the ones with the fire selector switch and the magazine in the pistol grip, Gabe fell ill.

Nothing serious. The infection that passed in less than a day, but in the meantime left him feeling as though that day would be his last. He insisted Peggy go without him to Howard's dress-up affair, because they had, for a very long time, instituted a policy of avoiding Howard's dress-up affairs whenever possible, and now they had racked up a kind of debt to Howard. And because this affair was more special than most. Someone had to make an appearance.

"Sly. I'll be doing double-duty. Probably your plan all along. I'll bet you were _primed_ for infection," Peggy said, hitting Gabe with a pillow. But she passed him the phone anyway, stepping over the cord stretching from the bed to the wall, and let him call Howard to make his apologies.

He was still on the phone when she'd finished toweling her hair, pulled on her clothes, selected a suitably dour set of pearls, arranged her fringe in that unattractive Washington style that guaranteed endless compliments in those days, and had begun to contemplate whether a pistol strapped to the thigh or a pistol in the handbag would make less of a ruckus when Howard's people failed to recognize her and demanded to scrutinize her person. Thigh. Probably. Doubtlessly.

"You still doing your bangs?" came Gabe's voice from the bedroom.

"My berettas," Peggy called back.

She heard him say. "Better make sure they know she's coming, Howard. You don't want them to pat _her_ down, trust me." This sort of thing was precisely what made him was such a wonderful husband. Then he rather ruined it by adding, "Peggy! He wants to talk to you."

Howard was sure to be at his Howard-est right now. Even if his Howard-est was, generally speaking, on the decline. These days he was strangely bleached, his black hair receding to a brownish grey, his healthy tan giving way to pallor, as though underneath all his spark he'd been made of metal all along, and had never bothered to reveal it to anyone, and now the metal was oxidizing. But a man like Howard only ever needed a new current to jolt through him, some fresh concept to give him life. He would never really rust away into his fifties and sixties; he'd simply re-wire himself with some new purpose, and keep on going to meet the future head-on.

And now he had a new spark. That was the point of the whole party. Well, aside from the weapons. The weapons were the point. The other thing was an added bonus.

Peggy wondered where Gabe had put the gift.

"Do you know that Dum Dum's dance card is full this time, too?" Howard demanded, as soon as she put the phone to her ear. "And Morita's!"

"I should think your circle of acquaintances is large enough to compensate," Peggy said. She put her hand on the receiver and hissed to Gabe, "Where did we put the gift?"

Gabe looked frustratingly blank.

"Well, you'll be there," said Howard, as though she hadn't spoken. "That's something. Listen, I've promised Maria nothing but pomp and lighthearted gaiety."

Maria was in the wrong city for that, and nearly nine years too late, but a woman in her position had a right to demand things, Peggy thought. That new fresh spark, and all.

"That means no talking business where she can hear," Howard continued. "It's fine to talk about the guns, of course—"

"Right. Naturally," Peggy said, twisting around the corner and into the hallway as far as the telephone cord would let her. She scrutinized the hall from one end to the other, all business. Assessed each doorway in turn.

"—but none of our stuff, you know. No SHIELD. She has this, this _notion_," Howard said, "That I'm just ready and waiting to dive right back into some project. Like work's a—a kind of contamination. And she thinks I'm willing to be contaminated. Or something."

"Yes, yes," Peggy said. She glanced up the stairs. Tried to crane her neck to see into the nook just underneath them.

"Not yes!" said Howard, indignant. "I'm ready to admit that I'm a man with – with numerous business interests. Important ones. But I told her six months taking things slow, and I intend to keep that promise, and—"

It would never happen, Peggy reflected. Not even for the spark. God, that was depressing.

She scanned the far end of the hall, and caught sight of ribbon trailing down from a shelf. There! Only she'd never be able to reach it as long as she was tethered to the phone. And the minutes were ticking by. She didn't particularly want to spend a long evening deflecting questions from the First Lady, but neither did she want to show up late. Peggy remained professional even in the face of the extremely unpleasant.

"Listen, I have to go," Peggy said. "I'm running late."

"Well, yes, but only for _my_—"

"Not quite yours. See you soon," Peggy said, and hung up.

This meant Howard was waiting for her when she arrived. He looked more put together than normal. More and more, as the future crept in to meet him, Howard retreated to back rooms full of whirring machines. It reminded him of his past in bunkers. That was partly why he made a habit of it. Only, in the past, he'd been all gleaming shoes and crisp ties, even in the bunkers. Nowadays he tended to look tired, particularly when he thought no one but his close friends and the machines could see. Now his ties went undone. His shirtsleeves hung a little listlessly.

Poor spark, to meet Howard so late in the game.

"With a send-off like that," Howard said, "You strike me as a woman dying to meet the man of the hour."

She couldn't argue with that. She did want to meet him. Howard personally escorted her past his bodyguards – no pat-downs, thank goodness – waved off several persons of some note – reporters, business associates, generals – and ushered her straight to the beautiful colonnaded deck overlooking the grassy knoll that sloped down to the waterfront. The Stark spark was waiting. Fireworks painted the sky above his head. Chatter and music and distant gunfire from the nearby shooting range sang him a lullaby. His beautiful mother, in a silvery caftan dress with her hair newly platinum, as though she were made from stars and alloy, gave Peggy a hug.

Peggy handed her the gift. It was not an imaginative gift. Only a stuffed bear. She'd intended to place it before the child directly. Unfortunately, he was not accepting gifts at the moment. He was imprisoned.

"What is that?" she asked.

She wasn't surprised, of course. Howard being Howard. But the other people present probably hadn't been expecting it, this mechanical hutch of iron and glass, with special vents and a mobile of spaceships built right in and the large and colorful panel of red buttons along the side. That probably accomplished all manner of useful things, if she knew Howard. One button probably changed the nappies. Another might adjust the blankets. The very large and alarming red one might, for all they knew, detonate the entire structure in the face of Chinese-backed Vietcong attack.

"It's the one-of-a-kind," Howard said, lifting up a finger, "But soon to be mass produced: Starkpen! Alright. I'm still working on the name."

"And on making parenting obsolete," said Maria, making an exaggerated face that indicated she wasn't really all that upset by the notion. She had a tremendous tolerance for Howard; she was very open to his every quirk, which was exactly what Howard needed in a woman. Someone who was strong enough to let his foibles brush over her without ever once affecting her very much. Peggy squeezed her shoulder anyway. Maria shrugged.

The Starkpen was monogrammed along the sides in red and silver paint.

A. E. S.

"People are going to think that stands for Already Encased in Steel," Peggy commented.

"Nobody knows about Howard's acronym thing better than you," Maria said, without a trace of resentment, simply stating a fact.

Peggy had to assume that she'd had a hand in the baby name. Everyone had been a bit shocked to discover that they'd gone with something as thoroughly normal and human as 'Anthony.' When Howard was impressed with himself, when he believed fully in the goodness and utility of his work, he liked to declare it to the world. For example: once, he'd handed someone he admired a shield. A prototype, really. The greatest piece of heroism he'd ever had a hand in, he liked to say.

Called on to designate the name of a government agency, he'd stayed up for long nights (she knew, because he'd told her) poring all his energy into figuring out what on _earth_ would spell out SHIELD and had a vague relation to national defense.

Howard was a futurist, they said. But that was just how Howard sold himself. He clung to the past as much as anyone else did. He didn't like to let memories slip away. He painted and carved and monogrammed his past everywhere he could. So, as Dernier had said on his visit last week, little Anthony Stark was very very lucky that his father hadn't decided his initials should spell out ALLIES or COMMANDOS or THAT WAS ME; I HELPED ROGERS, or something.

A slightly callous observation. Peggy had felt bad for laughing at it. The years had made her harder, put an edge in her laugh. They did that to everyone; it was simply a natural facet of the aging process. But still. A bit unkind. And that wasn't really Howard's MO, because Howard liked to make an obvious splash whenever he could; and now, twenty-seven years down the road, there would have been no splash in referencing the Commandos. No one would have gotten the reference.

The shield, the commandos, the bunkers with their machines and their geniuses in shining shoes… That was over. To say it was mere memory would be kind; it was obsolete memory, for the most part. Only six or seven people bothered with it all, and even they mostly discussed it out of a kind of desperate shared nostalgia. They were a unit tossed to the winds, occasionally circling back to meet each other, eager to show that underneath it all they hadn't changed that much.

Chester Phillips! Dead. What a shame. I hadn't spoken to him in years, had you? Well. He was a soldier to the end, wasn't he? I think he still thought it was nineteen forty five.

Do you remember the papers that resistance fighter, Rose Gluck, I think, left us in Lyon? And how when they pointed the way you said you were going to marry that girl? I always remember that.

Monty's daughter, that Jackie, that girl has spirit. Peg, I swear, the last time I visited, she was like you flying in from Talinn. That's the picture I always have of you. The way you knocked into Cap for assuming someone else would have taken the mission, and how Barnes was in the corner laughing into his canteen; it happened just like that with her and Monty and me…

Like they remained the faithful old band. Some small part of them wanted to have stayed the same. But they couldn't. It was over. They each opened themselves up, in small ways, to the new, hard, bitter world every year. And even though the old world had been just as hard and bitter, would seem that way if they ever bothered to really think about it, they never did bother to really think about it. It was easier to let the gloss of nostalgia color it all golden.

One lone Stark submersible headed up North every year. This was mostly out of a vague sense of tradition. If it had stopped trying, six or seven people would have raised an outcry, Howard and Peggy foremost among them. But no one really thought it would find anything anymore.

"I'm not making parenting obsolete. I'm just enhancing it," Howard was saying. "Look! Doesn't Ant look happy?"

Mostly he looked asleep. Which probably spoke wonders for the soothing power of the Starkpen.

"Tony," Maria said.

"What?" said Howard, now directing Peggy – with fatherly pride – to the panel of buttons, and outlining in a low voice just what each one did (yes to nappies, yes to blankets, no to detonation).

"We agreed we were calling him Tony. Not Ant," said Maria. "_Ant_—"

"Is a small creature that surprises us by carrying more than its own weight, like the heroes of old," Howard said. "_Tony_ describes gangsters from Brooklyn and very old socialites."

It was 1972. Brooklyn had fallen out of favor.

"I like socialites," Maria said languorously. She mechanically put her drink down, then stretched like a cat on her divan, settling in for a good fight. She could always give Howard a good fight, but a nice quiet one with no bullets whizzing, which made her the perfect blend of Howard's past and his comparatively-sedate future. Peggy decided it was time to excuse herself.

"You'll see, he'll like Ant better when he gets older," Howard said, waving Peggy off as she pointed in the general direction of some generals. "His old man is gonna sell him Ant…"

Well. And his mother would probably sell him Tony. Children were shaped by their forbears, infected with their dreams and priorities, just the same way regular people were infected by the changing world around them. But Peggy felt for the poor little Stark spark, lying there in his pen, already the subject of such intense debate over his very name. Already he had a choice to make. He lay there with his tiny hands curled into fists, in the protective suit of metal and fatherly devotion that Howard had built for him. But Howard had completely forgotten to build in defenses against the simplest, most defining of concerns: Anthony Edward Stark's basic identity.

But then, she thought, glancing around at the guests, this made Anthony Edward Stark very wholly American. His entire nation was absorbed in just the same choice, every day, over and over again.

Like right now. The American party was in the process of defining itself. The result was a kind of double-speak. Two kinds of celebration, very different, winding around each other. Concealing. On the surface, Howard's unlikely blend of christening day and sales expo produced just the pomp and gaiety his wife required. CIA chiefs laughed uproariously over the canapés. Senators and world-renowned engineers assembled near the range, ogled the display, and traded jokes. Several persons had a kind of dour humorous thing going about a dinner at some Continental room. A famous prosecutor who'd recently put a man away for murder offered a cigarette to a general who very freely ordered several hundred deaths a day.

On the surface, all of this happened. It happened for Howard. Howard was the man who kept so much running, who greased the century and repaired it and put guns in its hands. For Howard, it was nothing at all to ignore the panicked, infectious outside world, and in fact Washington was very good at doing just that, and might have done it for anybody.

But here and there real life, like a contagion, slipped in. Two hundred and thirty eight persons dead recently from a flood in North Dakota, said a representative for Missouri, and wasn't that sad. Yes, replied a Senator's aide from Florida, but the 117 dead by hurricane were surely worse. Well, reflected a businessman from Alabama, Let's not forget the tragedy that was the death of Governor Wallace.

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was discussed in hushed voices. Many in Howard's camp disliked it on principle; the trick was to find clever reasons to explain why.

Haiphong Harbor slipped into more than one discussion, dropped like olives into a glass. It made a nice garnish for the topic of selling grain to the Soviets. Christmas was a long way off, but certain people believed bombing over Hanoi would be likely, but no one brought it up directly. It just sat in the bottom of the drinks.

Prisoners of war featured heavily on the news, but here this was not on the table. Out of deference to Howard, and perhaps out of personal preference, people instead slipped in saucy jokes about Leonid Brezhnev being let down by the Chinese. Cambodia was not much discussed. People were tired of the topic. It was like the very yellowest of the cheeses on the waiters' platters: it sat largely untouched. General remarks about Kissinger were favored instead. Vague talk of Shirley Chisholm. Even vaguer agreement that biological warfare would be terrible; good thing the Soviets publicly opposed it, too, as no one could ever have expressed such a brave opinion if it turned out the Soviets liked it.

How sad, said a few people, that it turned out Howard Hughes's autobiography had been fabricated. Was there nothing sacred about our shared American history? Was it all a lie? How wonderful it had been. How much better than today it was.

But they didn't seem at all upset by today. In fact, they seemed very open to today. True, no one liked Black Panthers. But more than one person spoke in thrilling tones about Generals Davis, Lee, and Jackson's faces carved into the Georgia landscape. Everyone wanted to be very clear that they only glorified past violence.

Purchasing details were hammered out for the new model-7s.

"Director Carter," said a voice behind her. "Is it me, or are these people total fakes?"

Peggy turned around. Alexander Pierce was leaning against a column. He gave her a wide smile. Pierce's smiles were often wide and genuine; it was part of what people liked about him. He was marked by an unshakable _realness_, as though it didn't matter what he hid, because what he was showing you was true enough. This made him invaluable to SHIELD. He was an internal decisions man, a composed and power-driven desk component, not a field agent, but he took to that side of the work far better than Peggy had ever been able to. In fact, without meaning to, he infused the diplomatic angle with a kind of grandeur. Straight-backed and blond and strangely ageless, with calm blue eyes and a steely manner, Pierce was a kind of beacon for their work, a symbol of how to make double-speak and lies perfectly painless, the image of modern defense, no longer star-spangled and gaudy, but grey-suited and rational and wholly American.

It was no wonder he'd been invited, because Howard liked him, because he reminded Howard acutely of Steve, and always had.

But Peggy had never made the connection. She liked Pierce; his ability to handle difficult situations was remarkable, and his demeanor impenetrable when it had to be. But he was, at best, a kind of inversion of Steve. Pierce was not marvelous because he was human; he impressed because he could turn cold and functional when necessary, and Steve had been many things, but never merely cold and functional.

Sometimes, as now, there was a determined rebellion to Pierce, a reaction to Washington phoniness, to Washington hard choices. In this, maybe, there was a glimmer of Steve. Inasmuch as Steve had become a larger-than-life memory for her and a glimmer of him existed in anyone who seemed honest and true. Here the glimmer expressed itself in subtle Pierce ways, the rebellion was backlit by a glassy smile, the whole thing became one small truth to divert attention from the whole. Steve had been a soldier. Pierce was not that, and never had been. Though he was rarely in the field, he felt sometimes like their very best spy.

"I don't think people in our line of work get to complain about being fake, Mr. Pierce," she said.

"No, no," he said, laughing. "That's true, but it's not what I was getting at." A waiter passed by, collecting and redistributing glasses. Pierce quirked an eyebrow, a silent question, and at Peggy's nod he lifted their empty glasses onto the tray and snagged them both new drinks. Then he said, "You were in the field, Director. An agent. You did the dirty work these people discuss like so much tawdry old news."

Peggy did not see the connection here. "And?" she said.

"And that makes your lies a little bit more valuable," Pierce said, smiling again. He raised his glass to her, very deliberately. Then took a drink.

This maudlin mood was antithetical to the genial party atmosphere, and it was very un-Pierce. He could generally suit himself to the mood of any occasion. This was something Peggy valued in him.

"Is there something the matter, Pierce?"

Pierce gave her a sideways glance. "Two things," he said. He held up a finger. "First, I'm avoiding Zola."

"Aren't we all," Peggy said. Zola was their own Wernher von Braun, only unfortunately less likely to retire in a few months, given that Zola claimed to like the work he was doing. Peggy would have found this reassuring in any other employee. Not so much with Zola. He'd been assimilated into SHIELD at the command of her higher-ups, and remained an uneasy fit. Peggy didn't like him. Howard had invited him in and still didn't like him. Zola, like Howard, lived in back rooms full of machines. But contact with Zola was kept to an absolute minimum; exchanges with the man were delegated to unfortunates like Pierce, steel-grey subordinates who wouldn't grumble about it and yet wouldn't give an inch.

"Has Zola done something?" Peggy asked. "We know he's…odd."

An understatement. Entirely unrepentant about never being properly tried for war crimes. That was more correct.

"Well, he likes to handpick his people," Pierce said. "And he wants me for something. But Zola—He's an ivory tower man. He likes to be up above the rest, looking down his nose."

"Yes, well," Peggy said. "Nazi."

"Hydra," Pierce corrected. "I know. I've seen the files. I—do you know Obadiah Stane?"

The abrupt hair turn, the sharp twist in the conversation, this was very Pierce. It was terrific when he turned it on other people. But Peggy often had him to tone it down when he was talking to her. Still, she indulged him right now. Sometimes Pierce's turns took you to unexpected and groundbreaking places. And she _did_ know Stane. He was one of Howard's hires, and blissfully concerned with one thing: turning Howard's money into more money. She understood him as somewhat unprincipled in that sense, but the lack of principles ran both ways: years and years ago, when she'd first married Gabe (thankfully, D.C. had never had anti-miscegenation laws), Stane had encouraged Howard to drop her from SHIELD, argued that she represented a significant financial risk, a bad investment. Stane talked like that. People were not people to him. They were figures. When the national climate had changed enough to make Peggy's marriage more fashionable, Stane changed his tune.

She followed to where Pierce was pointing, and there Stane was. Cooing over the baby in his pen. Peggy wondered idly, horribly, how much money Stane planned to make on those pens, how much money he thought he could get for the baby. Stane thought in dollar signs.

"He's your standard salesman," Pierce said. "Money is air to him. But he makes links to people Howard doesn't like talking to. That's what his job is. To—to handle the things Howard won't muddy himself with that. Stane doesn't like Zola. Zola talks of order, a fascist to the end. Stane was never a fan of that. But in spite of their differences, inside, where they count, Stane speaks Zola's language."

"Zola doesn't strike me as money-hungry," Peggy said, confused. "Just impenitent."

"So's Stane," said Pierce. He chuckled. "They're both about being superior. Stane dresses people up in dollar signs to show how much they're worth. Zola looks at blood and genetics. But it's all the same. They want to be better than other people without putting in the effort. Now, you, you've been in the trenches. If anyone has a claim to being superior, Director Carter—"

"I don't think anyone does," Peggy said flatly.

Pierce laughed again. This time it was a wholesome, genuine sound. He said, "Superiority is beside the point. My point is, it's better to be the person sacrificing, making real choices, stuck in the muck, a field agent in life, than the one locked up all day dreaming that they're better than other people when all they do is move men around."

Peggy blinked at him. Moving men around was precisely what Pierce did all day. He was a connection-maker. He snuck up on Senators, wrangled down agency leaders, knew intimately every major face on the Hill.

"Are you trying to tell me something, Mr. Pierce?" she said.

He put a hand to the back of his neck. It was almost boyish, almost bashful. It was the most like Steve she'd ever seen him.

(Still not even close.)

"You bring me to my second point," he said. "I'm leaving. The Director of Central Intelligence wants me. It's a pay dock, before you ask, but it's work that's closer to the kind that you do. Strategic planning. Collective security. It's work that goes beyond just forming my own little kingdom at my desk, where my hands are clean and I look after my own interests. Because I won't lie to you, Director. I admire you enormously. I want your job."

Peggy was speechless. She had never contemplated that they might lose Pierce. Pierce was so good at his job he was almost robotic. She'd never considered that he might not _like_ it. But everyone had to make choices, now and then, about who they wanted to be.

"Pierce—"

"Obviously not actually your job," he put in, laughingly. "But something like it!"

Peggy considered her words very carefully, and said, "Well. I think you'd certainly bring a lot to that kind of position. And I respect that you know what you want. It's no small thing to make a choice like this one."

Another of his all-American smiles.

It was 1972. In a few days, five White House operatives would be arrested for burglarizing the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Some time after that, the man who had hired Pierce to Central Intelligence would be fired for refusing to block the investigation. Then Chinese relations would open up; Chile would erupt; Communist forces would take Saigon; the Khmer Rouge would seize the S.S. Mayaguez.

Harvard's Professor Milgram would publish a book that was all about how Americans, if instructed to, would willingly torture a man. They wouldn't demand the freedom to choose otherwise. Not if the person addressing them seemed official. The glorious past, where there was a difference between _us_ and _them_ — that was slipping away. Many people realized that there hadn't been a time that was exactly like this one. But many more, to cope, swore that every time leading up to this one had been, without a doubt, golden and glorious and spangled and _better_.

(HYDRA sat beneath the skin, an infecting force no one knew about. And that was fine. It waited until it was sought out. And many Americans would seek it. It would become an American institution.

America would open itself up to it. It already wanted to be infected. It wanted to end the chaos that sat uncomfortably at the parties, that poisoned the atmosphere, that made every pronouncement seem like a lie. America would choose to be infected, really.

Pierce would, too.)

Zola approached Peggy later. She was not impolite, but she told him very little. He was sick. He was dying. He loved his machines. She saw in him a sad old man who would fade away and become a memory, someone who would be lucky if he kept his mind at the end.

"We never lose the mind," Zola said, "Unless we want to. The mind will not go if it is made perfect, made methodical, made more than human, Director Carter."

"I'm sorry. I think I see the First Lady over there," Peggy said, and excused herself.

"If we give up the human flesh and weakness that drags it under," Zola called after her, like the withered old madman that he was, "Then the mind will spring into being, reborn, a new power that emerges after you have struck down the first!"

And if he said anything else under his breath after that, no one heard it at all.

* * *

Hail HYDRA.


	3. Chapter 3

In the eighties, they bought a house to be closer to Gabe's sister and Peggy's brother. It was a modest buy for people of their income level. It was roughly equidistant from Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Gabe's sister lived, and Astor Place, where Peggy's brother lived. It was in Brooklyn.

Had anyone consulted Howard he would have said, "Good God, why?" And then, with a sort of somber and vulnerable look descending, a rare look for Howard: "Oh. Well. Well, naturally Brooklyn."

Howard would have thought he knew why. But he didn't. Peggy and Gabe bought the house for exactly the reasons they said they did: the wide swooping staircase and the green glass lamps, the great mirror in the entryway and the carved marble fireplaces. Had anyone discussed this with Howard, he would have said, "You expect me to believe you fell for a little bit of antique charm?" with a knowing and insufferable glint in his eye.

But no one discussed it with Howard. Which was for the best. He wouldn't have understood. These things were only bits of charm on the surface. Newly and surprisingly coming back into vogue after years of harsh and angular mid-century modern, after the glorious Howard years. But vogue and charm had nothing to do with buying the house. It had a wide brown stoop like the house Gabe had grown up in, and the same tall windows and the same Greek honeysuckle ironwork. It had a gabled roof on one side and two dormer windows on the top story, like the windows in the nursery when Peggy had been small. That was all.

Some people believed that the past could predict the future. But that was nonsense. Nothing in Gabe's Harlem past could have suggested that he, son of a pacifist doctor, would end up married to a SHIELD director, or close friends with the leading arms manufacturer of the age. And nothing in that old country nursery could have hinted that Peggy Carter, daughter of a bank clerk and the daughter of a bank clerk, would not have settled down and made an appropriate bankers' wife, settled down and filled a nursery somewhere.

No. Any persons seeking to test Zola's algorithm on Peggy and Gabe would be disappointed. Changes in far-off Germany, which mathematically ought to have had no impact on them whatsoever, had instead thrown them both off course. And no algorithm could have explained the choices they'd made and the lives they'd had after that.

Gabe: found a vein of sympathy for the Jewish men at the Jazz club, the quiet aficionados who came respectfully every week, who did not sneer when they heard he was Howard-educated, who were impressed. Began to argue with his family, felt strongly that hushed American holocausts – restrictive policies, special lunch counters, and lynchings – didn't justify it happening to anyone else. Enlisted and saw firsthand that it didn't matter where he was or what he was doing: the world was a prison all over. And he would always remember two things: helping to dismantle the lunch counters, self-assured and strong. And how Zola's men had taken one look at him and said, "What use is a negro, if even a strong one?" and passed him over for unlucky Sergeant Barnes. How humiliating that had been. How secretly, guiltily relieved he'd been. How horrible it was to try and sift through the shame and anger afterwards.

Who could have predicted that?

And Peggy: slipping out to decry Mosley when London fascism was fashionable even in the countryside. Red lipstick. Freedom and victory on her lips at age sixteen. Her father had complained that she must have been in a _terrible_ accident. She hadn't cared. She taught herself to shoot using her grandfather's old Indian rifle, her younger brothers watching cautiously from behind a hedge. She'd signed up for the precursor to the Special Operations Executive, longing to parachute behind enemy lines armed only with nurse-taught French and German and a pair of pistols. She'd rescued a scientist, and then found herself gently shuffled back to the desk. She was a test case and they wouldn't give in and launch a full-scale SOE until 1941. So she'd taken Erskine's advice and made the switch to the Americans. And it was just as well. Americans were very practical. Anyone could parachute for the Americans. Such a great place for dreams America was. Even dreams clerks' daughters hadn't known they'd had.

So Peggy and Gabe defied any algorithm. They did not follow logically from their past selves.

But they did, between themselves, want to preserve (formalized in ink, on a deed) something of what had come before. Those cozy days – bright jazz for Gabe and rain-streaked windows for Peggy – when the future had seemed not terrifying and modern, but as orderly and comforting and familiar as any algorithm. So they purchased the house on Joralemon Street.

It was not a house that received many guests. Gabe put Jim Morita up there while Jim was writing his book, a difficult book, with a chapter about internment by America and HYDRA both. Jim had hit on the impulse to write it back home in California, surrounded by happy children and grandchildren, in an airy house overlooking a blue blue bay. He'd found that in such an airy house he couldn't possibly finish this analysis of prisons. He came East, where things were a little bit darker. He and Gabe each had a study on the third story, and they would throw open their doors from time to time and shout half-remembered insults. The toughest of tough old men. Then they would settle back to working. Or go downstairs for some milk.

Peggy did not work in the house. She could not work at home. Home was of course homey, and work had no business being homey. Peggy was used to work being a battle. She preferred it that way. At times she brought her favorite niece over, a special treat just for Sharon, but generally she visited Sharon and her brothers in Manhattan, on the way back from the New York HQ. And so very few of her people saw the house. Generally just the agent who came every day, stepped out onto Joralemon Street, nodded to the driver to wait, grasped hands with Gabe at the door, and was ushered into the conservatory until Peggy was ready to go to work. His gun was tucked under his jacket. Peggy's were under her jacket as well. Past a certain age, it just wasn't appropriate to strap them to one's thighs. Though Peggy didn't need guns anymore. She no longer had many battles to fight, which was a bit depressing, and SHIELD furnished her with the agent to be her second and her eyes and ears, and so the agent was her gun, really. One that came punctually every day to collect her and rode with her all the way to Manhattan, talking casually all the while, trading bits of hidden meaning sometimes, but more often simply being direct, which Peggy liked.

One more person did come by very often. Penny Hawley. Peggy was precisely one person in the universe who still called her Penny. She'd had served as a reference and friend for Penny in the 60s, when international security was _still_ wary of ambitious young women. They remained friends, but by 1991 Penny Hawley was in ascendance, while few people realized who Peggy was, especially New York people, because she'd formally retired in '89 and was now working purely in an advisory capacity. Penny's people doubtlessly saw her as a dotty and wealthy old relation, one who sometimes strode into World Security HQ with all the confidence of her golden years, trailed by a sinister-seeming bodyguard, only there to be overly familiar with Councilwoman Hawley herself.

Perhaps because she was now in an advisory capacity, December of 1991 held no great excitement for Peggy. They'd been working to undermine the Soviets for years. The end wasn't formalized in ink, on a deed. But they had people who'd been in Belavezhskaya Pushka not ten days ago – in fact, the commuting agent had been there, as commuting was not by any means his only task, and he was drinking to that in the conservatory. He had just dropped Peggy off after work. She didn't have the heart to toss him out straightaway. He was one of those agents who didn't seem to have a home, who simply evaporated at the end of the day. This made him a very good agent.

Peggy herself had been like that. She hadn't realized how very sad she must have seemed to people.

On this night, Sharon was over. She and Gabe's nephew shared between them the best guest room, the one with the dormer windows. Sharon was not feeling well, so Peggy had phoned her mother to ask about preferred treatment methods (Vicks Vaporub, no matter how much Sharon howled) and left her to sleep it off in bed upstairs.

"I want to play the secrets game! Or do more puzzles with you," Sharon had protested. 'Puzzles' were what she called the curious little books Gabe's nephew left behind, the ones with titles like _The Chronicles of the Black Hand Gang_ and _The Annals of The New Baker Street Irregulars_. Chapter upon chapter of dead bodies, backstabbing spies, eccentric scientists, and hidden treasures, always with a mystery at the end of the chapter, and then the answers printed upside-down at the end of the book. Peggy had selected the shortest puzzle as a means of coaxing her upstairs. The Impossible Murder of Professor Stiff, shot dead in his locked watched study, from which the murderer had disappeared like a ghost. Peggy had solved the thing in seconds – a career in espionage had to be good for _something_ - but she let Sharon struggle through until she was tired enough to doze off for the night.

A dozing Sharon was good. Hawley telephoned seconds later. Was she free? Did she want to meet? They hadn't met in some time (so much to do) but SHIELD's new director had been with her all day, owing to new developments in the Hague, and goodness but Howard Stark's planes did the trick. They were in New York already. So he'd had suggested they meet Peggy to celebrate, a kind of old guard all gathering together. Gabe could come, if he liked.

"My niece is here, and Gabe's gone to an affair at Fort Hamilton with Jim Morita. I can't really leave the house," Peggy said.

The agent was at the door, with a hand up like he wanted to take his leave. She nodded. He was nursing an injury from the mission nine days ago, and this was what had put him back on commute detail and dull old deputy work. But he was for all intents and purposes an espionage veteran himself – nineteen successful Soviet-undermining missions for SHIELD, though as of this month there wouldn't be a twentieth – and she felt more than a little awkward that he had to ask her to take his leave at all. But this was protocol. She'd done it without much complaint. He would, too.

Peggy heard some noise on the other end of the line.

"Is Deputy Command there?" Hawley said, after a minute. "I'm supposed to ask if he's there."

Peggy gave a noncommittal sound in response.

"Oh, tell him to stay," said Hawley. "We'll be over there soon. Pierce wants to see him, and it won't be any time at all."

Peggy put the receiver down.

"Councilwoman Hawley wants you to stay, Fury," she said, making a face. "If you want to go now, I'll make something up. But she _is_ on the council. It could be a worthwhile connection."

Fury elected to stay. Peggy was glad, though she wasn't especially close to him. People were not supposed to become close in SHIELD. They were supposed to become competent, effective, instrumental, made to operate without a directing intelligence if necessary, ungoverned by will or emotion, clean and mechanical, forged empirically by trial, not by connection to others. But Peggy herself was not like this. She was of course as efficient and precise as necessary to do her duty. But years and years ago, riding in a dull green jeep, she'd looked over her shoulder and produced a kind of hidden and secret smile, an fondness for some small spark of stubborn human thinking. And ever since then the smile had stayed close to the surface of her, and it meant that she connected with other lonely people: Howard, and Gabe who didn't quite know where he fit in Harlem even if he loved Harlem, and Jim Morita, and even Fury.

She missed work, but she had worked tirelessly to make SHIELD the vanguard of cold modern effectiveness. And so her own organization had outpaced her. It was fast planes and clandestine Soviet forests. And Peggy had jumped headlong into that, but secretly preserved within her was the echo of the woman in the jeep.

The past did not predict the future. What a backwards way of thinking. Peggy would have laughed at it. Gabe, Jim, Howard, they all would have laughed. The past did not predict the future. The future fixed the past into place. That was all. The young woman in the jeep might have been forgotten, might have slipped away. She might have meant nothing, an interstitial phase in a life of mechanical espionage. But Peggy, in being drawn to all kinds of unusual sorts over the years, had chosen to preserve her. So there she sat beneath the skin, always.

Fury had retreated back into the conservatory. He was looking out over at Gabe's garden, at the rows of beautiful creeping flowers and vegetables. Peggy would have joined him, but suddenly the phone rang again. The phone was forever intruding like this. No one came over, but everyone still called on her.

"Hello, who is this?" Peggy said. It was not the polite way of answering the phone, but it was the most direct and it revealed the least, which she preferred. Caller ID was a technological marvel in 1991; SHIELD of course had it, but Peggy and Gabe had never installed it themselves. It seemed like such a new thing for such an old and private home.

"Peggy?" came a familiar voice.

Howard. Calling all the way from California. On a Tuesday. And sounding not quite himself.

Of course, Peggy hadn't spoken to him in three months. She still considered him among her closest friends, and he felt the same way about her. But there was so much to do now for both of them. They would each strike on some odd thought, some interesting fact, some joke. And, on opposite sides of the country, they would think, "Why, you know who would love this?"

Always they meant eachother. But it never occurred to them to call. They had spent a lifetime working together, supporting each other. And each had infused the other with a great many unshakable memories. Howard had Peggy shooting at the Captain, Peggy shooting at Tony's first big party, Peggy shooting the rogue agent who'd attempted to infiltrate the new SHIELD HQ, Peggy shooting down Congress. And Peggy had a vibrant man in shirtsleeves growing thinner and sharper in his bunker every year – thinner and sharper but no less valuable.

So they missed each other. But each preserved the shadow of the other, and in an odd way this and the missing itself became enough. Peggy had stopped wondering what Howard would say if she told him some odd bit of news. She could predict it, she thought, based on his past actions. And Howard thought the same of her. In this way, they each embraced the algorithm.

Hypocrisy. But then they were SHIELD. This was nothing new to them.

Howard's voice was all wrong when he spoke again. Howard's voice had slowly begun to fade away, like the rest of Howard. The diagnosis? Age. Peggy thought it was age. But perhaps it wasn't. Howard was a futurist, a machine man. They were not supposed to grow old and obsolete. So perhaps it was all those years away from his friend, years of voicing his displeasure at useless associates, expressing himself in bullets and napalm and war, shouting down his son and wife. He hadn't used his voice well enough. So now he was losing it.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" Howard said.

What a strange proclamation. Howard did not care what other people believed, generally. Howard cared for what _he_ believed. And Peggy knew for a fact that he believed in two things: in select persons – human will wrapped sometimes in faulty packaging, but give it a job, call it a friend, or inject it with Vita-Rays, and see what happens! – and he believed in machines.

Not in ghosts.

Howard said, "I've seen—"

And stopped. Cut himself off.

She heard rustling on the other end of the line, like he was busy doing something. When he spoke again, there was a lot of static on the line. It was like Howard was trying to open his mouth and communicate, but something was blocking him, some part of him had finally made the conversion to full machine man. It no longer issued words. Now it produced jumbled telephonic communication.

"I can't hear you," Peggy said, confused.

"I—" Howard began. Someone spoke to him. Peggy thought it sounded like Maria. "Yes, the car keys are in my jacket pocket." Howard said. "No, no. I'll drive."

Then he breathed hard into the phone.

He was seventy-four. Some of his parts were breaking down. He didn't like to admit it even to himself. It seemed to him that he ought to have made himself a whole new body by now, a whole glorious machine self, like he and Pierce used to talk about. His form was a horrible imprisoning thing, wasting flesh that couldn't even muster up the humility to call his own son. If he could have summoned Tony up and said, "Let's do it. I've a new element I've saved for you. I've devised a great new project. Let's make a new me. Let's make a better father for you," he would have done it. He was one of the only people in the world who thought like this, who believed that you could take what existed beneath the skin of a man – the important stuff – and stick it in a better form and preserve it that way. He believed in it because he'd seen it happen.

But there was so much to do. There was always Obie at his elbow, with something that needed oversight. And there were always new meetings with senators and engineers and politicking young geniuses. He had no time. The future came so fast. No one had ever warned him about that.

The future came so fast, and sometimes it looked like the past.

"I saw something that reminded me of somebody we used to know," Howard said shortly. "That was all. I thought of you."

He thought of her very often. At seventy-four, Howard had few friends left. And among them Peggy reigned. She was valuable to him. He polished up the thought of her every day, it felt like. Her and his wife and Tony and a few others. Howard was bold and superior, but whenever someone asked him about the former SHIELD director he would say, in a surprisingly small voice, "Yes, she is my friend, actually. She is my friend."

Now he said, "At our age, maybe everybody looks like a friend. Anyway. Anyway, I thought I would ask if you knew who had the old files. The war files. Post SSR. Pre-SHIELD."

"What for?" Peggy asked, confused.

"I just need the medical records," Howard said. "From the old 107th rescue. And my old work on the cryofreeze unit. Can't seem to recall it. It's hard to know if my mind's playing tricks on me sometimes. Last week I could've sworn I turned on one of the programs your HQ sent me and it felt like something Zola might have cooked up. The numbers sounded like him. I know that doesn't make any sense, but. Well."

He sounded very maudlin and strange to Peggy. She wondered if he'd been drinking.

"I think we kept only essential things," Peggy said. "I think the rest is in a dusty cabinet somewhere. Though the Veteran's Historical Society—"

"Right," Howard said. "I—"

There was great deal he wanted to tell her. About Zola and about the program with the numbers especially. And about this other thing. The ghost. He settled for saying, "Have Pierce show you his new weapon. He. He's rescued a new weapon from Soviets. I stumbled onto this—this weird report on it. I—it's probably nothing. But. Some details. They don't add up. But then I thought of some anomalies in the medical records."

"Why? Is there some connection?" Peggy said, getting right at the heart of it.

"I don't know," Howard said softly. He knew she dealt directly and honestly, and he sunk himself in names and numbers. Somehow, this was how their friendship had shaken out. She – though an agent, though a spy of the highest order – had risen above to work publicly, humanely, wonderfully. And he had locked himself in back rooms with machines and downloaded the secret codes of the age. But they were still friends. When he had his suspicions, she ought to have been his natural confidant.

Only he wasn't so sure. He felt as though there was some intangible hidden danger. It needed to be brought to the surface, he thought. But suddenly he didn't want to endanger Peggy unless it was absolutely necessary.

"You know what? I'll deal with it," he said abruptly. "And. Well. If it's anything, I'll deal with it."

On the other end of the line, Peggy decided that he was definitely drunk.

"Howard, that—"

"Don't worry about it," Howard barked out. "I've got to go. Listen. I. Don't listen to me."

"Listen, don't listen," Peggy repeated, with some laughter in her voice.

"I'm upset about Tony," Howard told her reassuringly. "He was supposed to be at this meeting today. Supposed to drive out with us afterwards. Anyway, speaking of, I need to go for a drive. I just thought of you, that was all."

He hung up the phone. The weapon didn't matter so much, probably. The number thing was more important. And once he had something concrete to give Peggy about that, he'd call her back up, and then he'd bring her into the loop. Only then. It made no sense to worry her otherwise. She'd earned some peace after all her years of making spy work a little more direct, a little more streamlined.

Peggy stared at the phone, confused.

She didn't bring it up immediately when Hawley and Pierce came over. She didn't have to. Pierce brought it up.

Pierce was not particularly close to Hawley. They just shared positive feeling over the events at the Hague. He was closer to Fury, an agent he'd personally brought onto the team, and therefore Pierce let him alone to impress the Councilwoman. He sat by Peggy by design, and toasted his hostess, and said, "Howard's work is as faultless as ever. You should see the plane. The Councilwoman's impressed."

"I've told her that already," Hawley piped in, and went back to remarking on Moldova and Tajikistan with Fury.

Pierce waved affably in her general direction. Then his voice dropped low and he said, "Truth be told, sometimes I worry what will happen. If the man's become a little loopy. He's not young, you know."

"He's my contemporary," Peggy reminded him.

"Yes, and you're sharp as a tack," said Pierce. "But you know Howard. Little paranoias worm their way in with him. He gets infected with these weird ideas, fantasies—"

It wasn't incorrect, but, much as Peggy respected Pierce, this was not something she would ever discuss with him.

"—and you just get the sense that he's got a whole hidden conversation going on beneath the surface."

"That's not a general SHIELD trait?" Fury put in, before parrying the Councilwoman's remarks with an observation on Azerbaijan.

Peggy laughed.

Pierce shot Fury a friendly but aggrieved look. "Seriously, though," he said. "In a younger man, that's ego. At his age? You have to wonder. Last week we started discussing—"

"He told me," Peggy put in. "The acquisition of a new weapon. From the Soviets."

Not a blink from Pierce. He said smoothly, "Yes. We got it a few months back. Very experimental."

"I haven't heard about this," put in the Councilwoman.

"Me neither," said Fury.

Peggy hadn't, either.

"God, that Furlough. I've gotta fire him," Pierce said. "Are you serious?" He appeared touched by a moment of genuine upset. A rare thing for Pierce. "I'll personally make sure the project's on your desks," he told all of them very seriously. "It's not a big thing, you know. It's just that after the August coup – see, you weren't even in town then, Fury – we managed to get our hands on some, some weird things. We have all this data Zola left over about experiments at the end of the war. Turns out, they've had stuff in Moscow they seized years ago and just stuck in cold storage. Can you imagine?"

Most of them had a good laugh about Moscow doing that.

That Moscow.

"Anyway, most of it's useless, some of it's interesting, but then we hit on this weird weapon," Pierce continued. "36452. American parts, German engineering, tested by the Soviets. But very…unstable. I'm not sure if it's trustworthy. And, you know, they stuck it between spare gun parts and rolls of old wire. How much did they trust it? Howard comes in on the fly, like he does, rifles through everything, like he does, stumbles on a status report about it and just looks at it for like twenty minutes. When I come in, he tells me: 'I'm thinking of transitioning into personal computing.'"

That did sound erratic. But it also sounded _Howard_, like something had jarred him, made him see things differently. He'd received a new spark.

"After he made all those fortunes on weapons?" Councilwoman Hawley said, laughing.

"What did you do after that?" said Fury.

"Well, he wanted me to send it to him," said Pierce. "But it could be dangerous, and he's getting older. I sent him a… a model we got from one of these outside companies, trying to muscle in on him. Not exactly fair, you know, but—"

"Hey, if they send it to you," said Fury.

"Yes, how silly of them," Hawley said.

"Sending Howard something direct from his opponents, though," Peggy said, frowning. "Bad business practices."

"Right, but we're talking _Howard_," said Pierce. And he had a point. Howard's business practices were not exactly wonderful. They weren't even Howard's sometimes, they were Obadiah Stane's, but then Howard had let that parasite infect his company, so he wasn't above responsibility.

Pierce continued, "Anyway, what I sent him should be getting there right about now. He'll send me back what he thinks about it." He looked at Fury, nodded to the Councilwoman, put a hand on Peggy's hand. "You know me. It's not just doing a favor for Howard. Howard's my guy. He builds things that don't fail. When it comes to something like this, I trust Howard's judgment above all else. I can't wait to hear what he thinks about it."

Howard did not get a chance to tell anyone.

The details of the Soviet weapon arrived on everyone's desks after they heard the news. Councilwoman Hawley thought the weapon was too risky. She commended Pierce for taking on something that could have been used against them, and gave Pierce full clearance to put it back in storage – this time for SHIELD. Fury advised they proceed carefully: the Soviets had given it some joke codename, an old wives' tale. It was either useless or very very dangerous. Pierce should select the best possible team to make sure it didn't get out of hand.

"Oh, I will," Pierce said. He rifled through all the friendly signatures, the permission he had now, the power to invoke SHIELD's help and resources in this matter. His HYDRA was a fledgling virus. But every day they became a little more like SHIELD, as a few more amenable signatures trickled in. They were not an infestation these days, not really. They were SHIELD, they did business the same way SHIELD did, SHIELD learned about their projects and signed off, no questions asked. So Pierce had authorizations, consent, tacit approval to do what he liked.

It was diplomatic nonsense. It was false. It didn't affect his actions either way.

And Peggy? She looked over the file -_ 36452 (Winter Soldier) _- and had her first real chance to understand. But she was seventy-two. Her parts were failing. The conversation she'd had with Howard had slipped out of her mind. Grief had slipped in instead, and filled up the cracks inside her, and she never got around to reviewing the file properly, or even wondering why on earth the details surrounding 36452 were so vague. They didn't even know what it was, really. It was a locked and frozen-over cabinet. Maybe nothing was inside.

* * *

No one came for the thing in the cabinet. Not Howard. Not Peggy.

Just Pierce.


End file.
